Massé Shot
by Road Rhythm
Summary: In a little bar in Nowhere, New Mexico, Dean Winchester makes a miscalculation. Sam has to survive it. Neither of them knows yet what they've lost.
1. One

**Summary:** In a little bar in Nowhere, New Mexico, Dean Winchester makes a miscalculation. Sam has to survive it. Neither of them knows yet what they've lost.

**Notes:** Written for summer_sam_love on LJ, where the prompt was: _The brothers are in a bar, Dean's hustling pool, and he doesn't perform up to his usual stellar standards. They're outnumbered and Dean doesn't have the cash to settle up the debt. His very scary opponents suggest perhaps Sam could find a way to "compensate" them that doesn't involve money. Pandemonium ensues._

In pool, "massé" refers to putting spin on the cue ball along both the horizontal and the vertical axis of the ball, accomplished by sharply elevating the butt of the cue. The result is a shot where the ball sharply curves and/or reverses direction without ever having to touch a rail, and which is infamously hard to control.

For the record, the last time I was in Cuba, New Mexico, all of the people I encountered there were absolutely lovely. Bar, unincorporated hamlet, and all personnel 100% fictional and _not_ based on real experiences.

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><p>º º º º<p>

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><p>This is the most shittastic dive Sam has ever been in, and he spent three summers searching out the Bay Area's finest. He has never seen the equal of this place. Not even the places with smoky alleys and vomit dried on the stucco come close.<p>

Then again, Palo Alto isn't the middle of nowhere. After more than a year with Dean, Sam is pretty sure that the secret ingredient for a truly seedy bar is rural poverty. This place has it all: seedy backroom, window unit A/C, a sticky bar that makes Sam want to wash his hands just looking at it, splitting red vinyl on the chairs, cigarette butts wedged between the floorboards, and, of all things, a decorative mirror etched with a rifle and the legend _Winchester Repeating Arms, 1873, New Haven, Conn._ That last has a chip in the lower left corner.

There is, of course, a pool table.

Sam will never tell his brother, but he sort of likes these places. He's not sure why that's a secret. Maybe it's that he likes the way they simultaneously remind him of his roots and don't remind him of Stanford, the way he can feel like he's reinventing himself. Sam likes reinventing himself. Then again, maybe it's just that if he tells, there'll be one less opportunity for Dean to tease him about being a princess.

"Your break."

There's a solid _crack,_ followed by the quieter secondary collisions of colored balls with each other and the felt. Dean looks up from his shot—three balls pocketed, two striped and one solid—and gives his opponent a razor grin. The guy smiles back grimly.

Sam just shakes his head and hides his own grin. His part in this hustle is over. He and Dean have already played a few games where Sam mostly won and neither of them played very well. Medium-stakes bets, all very friendly. In the last match, Sam let Dean win; Dean then crowed loudly and faux-drunkenly, proclaiming to all who could hear that he needed a worthier opponent. Sam played the straight man, rolling his eyes and going off lean against the cigarette machine while someone stepped up to accept Dean's challenge.

Rattle-clunk. "Hey, nice shot! I mean, I'm still gonna kick your ass, but that was a nice shot." Dean. Drunken, over-aggressive and over-friendly.

Click, soft bump. "Thanks. Your turn." Dean's opponent. Flat, stone-cold sober.

Sam allows his gaze to wander over the clientele, walls, and gleaming curves of glass behind the bar, thinking of nothing in particular. He should be watching the game, he supposes, but he already knows how it'll end. Nor is there much excitement anywhere else at hand. It's three in the afternoon and they're in a patch of nothing outside of Cuba, New Mexico, which is a patch of not much to start with. Five people are in this bar, excluding Sam and Dean and including the bartender, a wiry man watching the proceedings with his arms crossed over his chest and this weird, twisted smirk on his face. All of them are back here milling around the pool table.

They're clearly locals and clearly regulars. One is tall and broad with a dark crewcut and a heavy ring; Sam unconsciously tracks his position where he stands drinking with a short man who has _Brad and Melinda_ tattooed on his arm, a few feet to Sam's left. The short guy moves jerkily, occasionally letting out a sharp bark of laughter. To Sam's right, a man who just looks average in every way leans one hand against the wall next to the bartender, watching the pool game and exchanging remarks that aren't audible over the music.

Dean's opponent is a big guy in a sheepskin vest who plays pool reasonably well. He's more laconic than his friends. The bartender calls him Eric; he calls the bartender Carl. Eric orbits around the pool table, sometimes backing right into Sam's personal space to line up a shot.

Each time he comes close, he eyes Sam. Sam's used to people staring at him when he comes into bars like this in a button-down and new Levi's, looking every inch a college student, so he ignores it.

Somewhere else, Sam and Dean's positions would probably be reversed so that Dean could work the crowd. Dean is better at poker, and Sam is… well, he isn't actually _better_ at pool yet, but he looks fair to get that way. Dean is the master of playing people and playing people against each other. Sam prefers the physics and geometry of pool, the abstract strategy. Since there's no crowd to work here, Dean plays and Sam waits.

The local Dean's playing rests his cue on the floor and folds his hands over it, blue cube of chalk between two fingers. "Want to make this interesting?"

Dean laughs too loudly. "Thought you'd never ask, you big girl you."

He glances up at Sam as he lines up a shot, fake-wobbling his cue, and gives him a grin so full of shit it could fertilize a farm. It warms Sam; so, of course, he rolls his eyes to be sure Dean knows it.

Dean's playing mostly center ball shots, like he doesn't know how to do anything else. He's still wearing his leather jacket even though the heat's on, and he's throwing everything he's got into the image, swaggering, jutting out his hip, feigning drunkenness and, more importantly, cockiness.

Though he gave up trying when he was twelve, except for a brief and embarrassing experiment in his freshman year at college, it's an image Sam has always wished he could emulate. Dean's façade is near-perfect. Very few people know where to scratch to find the seams. Hell, Sam knows it's bullshit, and he still catches himself falling for it sometimes. He's come to realize that the act is so good because Dean compartmentalizes the hell out of himself. There are things Dean will never let on to knowing, clean-slicing thoughts Dean will never let out, emotions Dean will never admit to having, whole swathes of Dean's vocabulary that he never uses in speech, because he has an image to present and he is _committed._ None of it is a lie, exactly; it's more that Dean deselects anything inconsistent with his badass image. Renounces it.

It's one way in which Sam has never been able to stop wanting to be like his big brother. He wishes that he could choose his image like that. Every time he tries, he just ends up hemorrhaging himself all over the place, and it's faintly disgusting even to him. Sincerity and Stanford diction and so very much anger get everywhere like bodily fluids, and when it happens, he'll always be humiliated thinking back on it, but at the time he can never seem to stop. Sam has never been any good at renunciation.

"C'mon," says Dean. "Let's make things interesting."

Eric is impassive. "Thought we already did."

_"More_ interesting," Dean persists. He's relaxed his drunk act just slightly. He drains the beer he's been nursing for the past three games and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Five hundred."

Between the two of them, they've got maybe eighty, max, but it doesn't matter. Apart from the eightball, Dean has three balls left to pocket; Eric has two. Winning this game will be easy for Dean.

Eric's eyes flick up to the bartender's for a moment. "Fine," he says to Dean, smiling. "It's your shot."

"You want another round, there, son?" Carl the bartender drawls, not moving from his stance against the wall and not sounding much interested one way or another.

Dean turns to face him with an easy smile. "Nope. Just want to play."

Sam slips his hands into his pockets and tunes in to see the endgame. Half his attention is still wandering backwards to a string of deaths in Detroit, but studying Dean is too habitual for him not to watch.

The cue ball lies at the end of the table furthest from Sam. Eric's two remaining solids are blocking most of the kick angles on Dean's stripes, and the remaining ones are useless. There's a combination shot that could sink the ten ball, but it's difficult enough to raise suspicion if Dean makes it. The best option Sam can see is a curve shot down about half of the table, bowing toward the side rail and bypassing the seven to sink the nine in the far corner pocket.

That's exactly the shot Dean moves to line up. He makes a firm bridge with his fingers, elevates the butt of his cue by about forty degrees, and strokes.

He misses the shot.

The cue ball's path curves sharply toward the rail instead of gently around the seven, striking the eightball and sending it into the side pocket with five object balls still on the table. Dean has lost the game.

For a fraction of a second, Sam assumes his bone-deep disbelief is down to long-ingrained faith in big brother. The wrongness is deeper than that, though, and when his brain kicks in he knows why. The physics is wrong. He saw the angle of Dean's cue, and after years of living in each other's pockets, he knows just by watching exactly how much force Dean put into the shot. It _couldn't_ have missed. Not like that. His mind tallies up the information and returns the only possible missing element.

The table was tilted.

Slowly Dean looks up from his shot. Sam can see in his eyes that he's reached the same conclusion.

Dean straightens. "How about one more, double or nothing?" he asks.

He's playing it cool, but his demeanor has shifted slightly. Everybody already knows the score: Dean knows he's been cheated; his opponent knows he's been hustled. Judging by the way they're subtly pushing away from their places around the room to drift toward the pool table, all his buddies know it, too. Suddenly Sam's full attention is locked on the room and everybody in it. He edges up onto the balls of his feet. Things are about to get ugly.

Eric takes a couple of steps toward Dean and looks him up and down. "I don't think so."

Dean chuckles, rubs a hand over the back of his neck, and flicks a glance over the room. "Man, you guys are barrels of fun, you know that?"

Eric taps the butt of his cue against the toe of his boot: _tap. Tap. Tap._ "Glad to hear it. How about you pay up and we part ways?"

Dean smiles tightly. "Yeah, about that."

He makes a move on Eric in the same instant that Sam turns and punches the guy with the crewcut. Crewcut goes down badly over a chair. Sam recovers his stance in time to see Eric land the shaft of his pool cue clean across Dean's face.

"Dean!"

He's expecting it when the man he felled moves in behind him. Hands clamp on Sam's arms and haul them back, huge and hard and far too sure not to have done this before. Before he can break the hold, the shorter one is in his face pulling a switchblade.

Sam tries to wrench an arm free out of sheer pissed-offness—they got the drop on them, _the whole goddamned bar,_ how can the whole bar have gotten the drop on them?—but the short guy pinks him with the switchblade as Crewcut yanks him hard against his body and hisses in his ear, "Hold the hell still." The guy with the switchblade—Brad—scrapes his knife across Sam's stomach under his shirt and grins the grin of the profoundly antisocial.

Like that, the skirmish is over. Dean has gone very still. The average-looking guy has joined Eric in crowding Dean into one end of the backroom, but Dean isn't fighting them anymore, his eyes locked on the switchblade. "Sammy, you okay?" he asks levelly.

Sam grits his teeth. "Fresh as a daisy."

Dean's face darkens. Sam has just told him that he can't reach his own knife. "Let him go," Dean says, doing that thing where he tries to command the whole room whether he has leverage or not.

Brad snorts. "Or what?"

"Way to be a cliché," Dean mutters.

"Could cut your five hundred bucks out of his face, Eric," says Brad, his blade biting meaningly into skin. Sam's skin breaks out in goose pimples. The guy is getting off on this.

Dean looks from one man to another. "Everybody just calm the hell down. Let's talk about this."

"Yeah, sure." Eric smiles. His gaze falls on Sam again and Sam feels it, seemingly palpable and curiously heavy. "Maybe baby brother can find a way to pay up that doesn't involve money."

Sam's mind skips over the words. He hears them fine and understands them, but he can't take them seriously beyond _How does he know we're brothers?_ The only thing that really registers is the look on Dean's face. That's what makes Sam go cold.

Brad laughs somewhere around Sam's collarbone. His breath filters up, damp and cloying.

Oh, God. Dean's _face._ "Touch him," Dean says, "and I will send each and every one of you to Hell myself. And trust me, you aren't going to like what's down there."

The part of Sam's mind that snarled on _that doesn't involve money_ is spinning in a tight little circle. His heart is beating rapidly and his emotions are far below on the ground.

Dean turns to the bartender, shouting, "Are you just going to stand there and let this happen in your bar?"

The bartender shoves away from the wall. What's on his face is more than anger; it's hate. "You think you got a right to come in, find the people who can't afford to lose anymore, and take them for a ride? You think that's cute and funny? Someone warned us you'd be coming, and you're not getting away with it this time. So hell yes, I'm gonna let this happen in my bar."

Sam narrows his eyes. "Someone warned you about _us?"_

They've seen no one, talked to no one but waitresses and gas station attendants for days. No one should know that they're here. They didn't even know they were coming themselves until this morning.

Sam clears all of it to the back of his mind and looks over the room, mapping its contents to memory and cataloguing everything that can be used as a weapon. There are two clusters of four chairs. Dean's pinned by two men and the pool table blocks his escape. The cigarette machine behind Sam blocks his access to the pile of spare cues. A plywood-patched partition bottlenecks the backroom off from the front, and he's separated from his brother by a few yards and five guys. The same threat's paralyzing both him and Dean: the switchblade.

Dean looks directly at the man he lost the game to. "You really think this is going to end well for you?"

Eric pushes up his sleeves to expose a crude prison tattoo: an eightball. "I'm thinking that if we hold you down and let you watch us holding _him_ down, you'll learn not to dish out more than you can take."

Yeah, time to be going, as far as Sam's concerned.

He looks down at Brad. "What's the matter, Brad? Melinda not putting out much these days?" He smiles tightly, flexing his wrist in Crewcut's grasp. "I guess one head's as small as the other."

Brad puts his face in Sam's. "What'd you say?"

"I _said,"_ Sam says deliberately, and head-butts him.

Brad reels away cursing. Crewcut's grip breaks with the forward jerk, and Sam follows up by driving his elbow hard backward and levering off the cigarette machine to wrench the man's arm back and up until he hears something tear. He sees Dean brace himself on the pool table and kick out against his opponents. The bartender bolts.

Sam starts after him. They can't take the chance that he doesn't keep a gun behind the bar. Brad steps into his path waving the switchblade. Sam knocks it from his hand with one kick and keeps going.

He sees Dean duck out of the corner of his eye: Eric's pulled a knife. Something cold and acid floods Sam's veins, and he charges Dean's second opponent. He reaches back for the Gerber in his waistband, starts to dip to hamstring the—

Pain crashes across his back, jarring deep. The wind leaves his body and his knees hit the floor. His knife is gone from his grasp, and he whirls to face the attack.

"Sammy!"

Sam hears the crunch of somebody hitting somebody else very hard as he shakes his head, trying to clear the black spots to the back of his vision. Crewcut is raising the thick end of the pool cue again.

John trained them never to lose themselves in a fight. Never to go too far past the event horizon to the point where they'd do anything, to the point where might not be able to stop. _Seventy percent fire, thirty percent ice,_ he told them, and years later Sam heard a concert pianist visiting at Stanford say exactly the same thing. John trained them that way because the things they hunt twine themselves so much into normal human existence, because so many civilians wind up in the crossfire. But for all the emphasis their father placed on that lesson, they never really had a problem with it, except for when they hunted together.

The cue comes down. Sam twists and reaches. His left hand explodes with pain, but he manages to grab the stick and hang on. Astonishment spreads on the man's face. Sam smiles grimly, yanks, surges up, and drives the cue into the man's abdomen.

The scream is awful in its humanness. It's not fatal, but he's down. Distantly, Sam hears the voices: _Jesus, oh, Jesus, man, oh, sweet Jesus, what the hell, what the hell?_ He rolls with the adrenaline surge and turns again toward his brother.

Dean's still trying to beat off Eric, who's Dean's height but far broader. The guy Sam tried to hamstring is shaking himself where he's stunned against the wall. Brad is scrabbling through the chairs, trying to find his switchblade and still saying, _Oh, Jesus, what?_ The bartender comes running toward the backroom with a rifle in his hands. And Dean's in his path.

Sam shouts and vaults over the corner of the pool table before he knows he's moving.

Eric turns to meet Sam's attack. His head still snaps back under Sam's fist, but the force of the blow is compromised and he comes back with a punch of his own. As he goes flying back into one of the clusters of chairs, Sam sees Dean step into the doorway and lay the bartender out flat.

Wood clatters around him. It's stupidly loud.

"Brad, get your ass in here!"

Brad's shoes appear and disappear on the floor, running to assist Eric. Sam catches his foot and tries to flip him, but Brad stomps down on the hand that caught the pool cue and Sam can't hold back his cry. He lashes out blindly with a foot, connects with something that swears. Brad's boot drives into Sam's abdomen in retaliation.

Eric grabs him by the ankles and pulls him from the mess of broken chairs. As he slides over the dusty floor, Sam hears Dean's yell of pain and hears it cut off with the sound of breaking plywood. _Dean,_ Sam tries to cry out, but he can't get his lungs working properly. There's a great crack, and Sam looks up to see Eric tossing aside the slender end of a pool cue, the sharp broken butt in his hand. He throws himself on Sam.

Sam twists away at the last moment. The broken cue scores over his ribs. He can feel a burning pain tear down his side and the deeper, wronger sensation of wood hitting bone. Warmth pours over his shirt—blood. He knocks Eric's hands away with his wrists and smashes his forehead into the man's nose, but Eric stays put. He stabs down with the pool cue again at the same moment that Sam plants his right foot in Eric's hip and tries to pivot out from under his body, and the wood gouges deep into Sam's left thigh.

Adrenaline makes the pain irrelevant and Sam keeps going, using the change in positions to shove Eric off of him and stumble to his feet. He trips over a chair and then Eric is there, checking him up against the cigarette machine.

"You little shit," Eric breathes against his ear. "You spoiled, thieving little—"

There's a hand on his belt buckle. It's preposterous. Sam's vision grays; Eric's arm is alongside his head and he can just make out the eightball tattoo looking back at him. Sam's hand scrabbles over the cigarette machine. He finds a knob, pulls, pulls _hard,_ and he has something thin and metal in his hand. A spring falls to the floor. Sam reaches between his own legs and shoves the metal pin up into Eric's groin.

Eric's cry is hoarse. It's distant through the throb in Sam's ears, like all sounds are, like his own skin is. Sam twists out from underneath his attacker and laces his fingers in the man's hair. In that moment, he is just a man, just a body, nameless. Sam drives the head into the object in front of him as hard as he can.

A knob goes through Eric's skull.

Sam stares down at the body in his hands. Blood spiders out from the patch of glistening dark in the forehead, and the eyes are wide and rounded. The place seems quiet all of a sudden. As he watches, the lips part in reflex. It looks like some unreal slow motion effect.

"Sam!"

Sam turns to his brother, wide-eyed. Eric's still hanging in his hands. Dean's clutches at the back of his neck as he stumbles toward Sam. The rest of the men are on the floor. Some are moving, some aren't.

Dean's hand closes on Sam's arm, and Sam blanches with nausea. "Come on, Sammy, time to go."

Sam doesn't move.

Dean looks down at the body, and after one blink, his face closes off. He grabs Eric by the collar of his sheepskin vest and tosses him away like garbage. Sam flinches at the thunk he makes when he hits the cigarette machine and flops to the floor.

"Time to _go,_ Sam."

Dean threads his arms under Sam's shoulders and hauls them both through the bar to the door. Dean's bleeding; Sam can smell it. Cold air washes over them and the sky is leaden gray.

Leaving Sam at the passenger door, Dean runs around to the driver's side and wrenches the door open. "We've got to move, we don't know whether the bartender called the cops. Get the hell in!"

Sam is shaking. "I didn't—I didn't mean to _kill_ him," he says, dazed.

Dean slams his palm against the hood, making Sam jump. His eyes are hard. "If you hadn't, _I_ would've. You understand me, Sam?"

"Yeah," Sam whispers.

"Good. Get in the car."

Sam manages to get the door open with his good hand and collapses into the passenger seat. The driver's side door slams shut after his; the Impala's engine roars to life. Gravel sprays under the tires as Dean turns them onto the road.

Dean swipes the sleeve of his leather jacket under his bloody nose and looks over at Sam. "How bad, Sammy?"

Sam swallows. "Could ask you the same question. They knocked you out?"

"Shut up and answer me. How badly did they get you?"

Humiliation burns Sam's face. He looks down at his hands, flexes them. The left one barely moves. "Think they broke my hand. Again."

"Forget that, where are you bleeding from? Is that—? Jesus, Sam!"

Dean's right hand is feeling over Sam's leg while Dean tries to keep his eyes on the road. "Knife?" Dean asks, voice a little high.

"Pool cue," says Sam, and grins irrelevantly.

Dean swears and retracts his hand from Sam's leg to pull instead at his belt buckle. Before Sam can ask what the _hell,_ Dean whips the thing off and dumps it in Sam's lap. "Snap out of it and put a tourniquet on," he says. "We're getting off the road."

The words ground Sam. The contours of the surrounding world sharpen when Dean has a plan, whether Sam agrees with it or not. As he wraps the belt around his upper thigh and cinches it, he asks, "Getting off the road? Where the hell are we going to go, Dean?"

Dean banks left onto a dirt road. "Back the way we came. I saw an abandoned construction site on our way up from Cuba, there's a trailer there. We can hole up for a while."

"What? Dean, no, we've got to keep moving."

"We're not doing jack until you're patched up."

"But—"

"My head's ringing and you're ruining the upholstery. We're getting off the road, Sam."

Sam remembers the site. Off the gravel county route there's a stillborn subdivision, construction halted with one house begun and a lot of pink marker tape fluttering in the wind. Piñon pines dot the sage scrub, dark patches of green against the taupe and gray. Snow whips past the windshield as they drive up the access road in a plume of dust. If they're lucky, enough will fall to obscure their tire tracks. If they're lucky, they'll get away with this. Sam will get away with this.

The construction office trailer is at the top of a ridge, visible from the road. Dean parks behind it, leaves Sam in the car as he goes to the trunk for sleeping bags and their duffles, and jogs up the wooden steps built to the trailer. He bends to pick the lock rather than forcing it, dumps the bags inside, and heads back for Sam. He stumbles on his way there, catching himself on the hood of the Impala and puking right on the ground next to the wheel. Sam means to get out and help him, he does, but the world is syrupy-slow and Dean's wiping his mouth and staggering to his feet by the time Sam's right leg figures out how to work independently of his left.

_Creak._ The passenger door opens to admit the ozone smell of the snow and there's Dean crouching there. "C'mon, I gotcha, I gotcha." Sam grunts as Dean wraps an arm around his waist and pulls him out of the car.

He's sweating in the snow. Hypovolemia, his brain supplies. His limbs feel heavy as he navigates the steps.

Dean pushes the door open and fumbles for a light switch. Miraculously, it's hooked up to something. Overhead illumination shows a couch, bits of equipment, and a broad plywood desk still littered with schematics. Dean lets Sam down on the couch and reaches into an inner pocket of his jacket for a bandana. For the first time, Sam can see the blood darkening a patch of Dean's tee shirt.

"Stay here, keep pressure on that other thing. I'll be right back."

"Gimme a look at your wound first," Sam says, holding the bandana to his side and pushing unsteadily to his feet. Pain flares from his ribs at every movement.

Dean catches his wrists. "Trust me, it's on my to-do list. Now lie the hell down and put your feet up."

Sam hasn't got the energy to waste on arguments. He obeys.

Outside, there's a sound he can't readily identify and he looks out the trailer's back window to see Dean pulling a tarp over the Impala. There's a few more bumps and rattles, and then Dean comes back through the door hauling pieces of dust-caked plywood, favoring his left arm way too much. He covers the back window and the two on the front, drags a file cabinet in front of the door, and starts methodically unpacking their stuff.

There's a long silence. Sam doesn't really notice it, trying to focus on breathing around the pain in his ribs, until Dean looks up from the items spread on the floor.

"Where's Dad's journal?" Dean asks.

"What?"

"Dad's journal, Sam, where the hell is it?"

Sam pushes himself up on his elbows. "You had it. You always carry it."

"You didn't—?"

"No!"

Sam stares at his brother as Dean sits back on his haunches. "Those guys," Sam says. "They knew we were coming, they even knew we were brothers. They said—"

"Someone warned them. Someone set us up." Dean stands, turns in a circle, and throws his fist into the wall.

The world tilts as Sam puts his feet on the floor. "The guys in the bar, they have to know something. We might get to them before the cops do."

Dean whips around. "Are you nuts? We're not going back there. Hell, you're not going anywhere!"

"We can't just leave the thing out there. Dad had notes about the yellow-eyed demon in there, about all kinds of things. We need it and God knows what whoever took it wants it for!"

Dean comes over and plants Sam back on the couch. "You think I'm planning to leave it?" His mouth is a grim line. "Later, Sam." His face softens slightly, and Sam can see the fear circulating under his anger. "Just… let me take care of you first, all right? Okay?"

Involuntarily Sam's muscles are relaxing, letting him sink into the couch. It's way too short for him. "Promise you'll take care of yourself, too."

"Yeah, I promise. Now, c'mon, help me out."

Dean tugs at his clothes and Sam manages to get out of his shirts, hissing at the protest from his ribs and as the fabric comes away from the gash down his side. Dean gets him stripped down to his boxers and resecures the tourniquet. Sam shivers.

"Don't suppose there's heat?"

Dean shakes his head and draws one of the sleeping bags over the right side of Sam's body. The slick fabric sticks to the clammy sweat on Sam's skin, but it's soft and starts to warm.

Out come the medical gloves. Sam reaches over and snags the first aid bag, extracting the rubbing alcohol squeeze bottle of saline.

"You know this is going to suck, right?" Dean asks conversationally. He's wiping at the wound on Sam's leg with gentleness that belies the gruffness of his tone.

Sam holds his head up and glares at him. "I got stabbed with a pool cue, Dean. I know."

"Just checking." Sam hears him draw his breath in. "This is nasty, Sam."

"Tell me about it."

Dean hesitates with the forceps and gauze in his hands. "You want a drink first?"

"Do we _have_ anything to drink?"

"Not really, no."

Sam laughs despite himself and then regrets it as the pain in his back and ribs makes his eyes water. Dean reaches out to palpate gently over his torso, opening his mouth as if to say something. But he doesn't. There's just his hands moving carefully over Sam's skin. Apparently satisfied that there are no compound fractures, Dean wordlessly moves on.

The first squirt of saline in the stab wound feels like acid. Sam makes no sound because no matter what Dean might say he's never been a goddamned pussy, and even Dean hasn't meant it the times he's said it. Sam's faintly aware that he's checking out a bit.

Dean picks up the forceps with his right hand and tries to hold the leg wound open with his left, but it trembles. "They wing you?" Sam asks softly.

He gets one of Dean's tense, I'm-invincible-but-not-really smiles. "Got my wrist stomped on; starting to stiffen up. I'll get it looked at in a state or two and we'll get your hand x-rayed. Give me your right for now and hold this thing open. You're gonna to have to pull your weight, here. Some of it, anyway, you freak of nature."

Sam smiles a little, not because he feels like it but because he knows it's his cue, and he can see a little of the tension run out of Dean as soon as he does. He parts the edges of his wound with his good hand and grits his teeth.

Really, it isn't the pain that gets you with wounds like these. He and Dean agreed on this one rainy night while lying under musty quilts in the loft of the cabin they squatted in when Sam was sixteen. Passing the coveted flask Dean had snuck up there between them, talking in hushed voices while John slept, they established beyond a doubt that it was additional sensations that came with somebody digging around in your flesh that were the kicker: the pressure, the prodding, the friction of removing foreign bodies, the forceps slipping and jabbing you in a deep bit that didn't need jabbing. Dean was the one who'd just been through the routine that night, sipping the whiskey on top of a Vicodin to numb the ache that usually sets in a couple hours after stitching a wound like that closed, and he was magnanimous, sharing with Sam swig for swig.

Sam watches Dean work now. The watery yellow sodium light softens his face, smudging his eyes with shadow as he works, completely absorbed in his task. The set of his mouth is loose and faintly unhappy.

Not quite a perfect façade, Sam reminds himself.

The wound on the outside of his thigh gets closed up. Sam and Dean move their good hands in slow concert to draw and tie off each knot. The instant the tourniquet comes off, the wound begins to throb. Sam's shaking. Dean lets him have some water, then pretends to drink his fair share and gives Sam the rest. The whole laborious process begins again with the gash scored down Sam's left side. Irrigation, disinfection, splinter removal, more irrigation, more disinfection, and then sutures, lots of them. Sam loses count….

Dean smacks him. Pretty hard, damn it. Sam shakes himself. "The hell did you do that for?" he asks, bewildered.

Dean cups Sam's cheek in his hand, fingers pressing hard and eyes serious. "Stay awake, Sammy. I know you're in shock, but I need your help with this. Sleep after, man."

With—? Oh, right. Sam blinks, and the sluggishness and nausea retreat slightly.

They tie off another knot. Black sutures look so ugly, Sam has always thought. Like decay or super-dark scabs.

"What do they want it for, do you think?" he asks quietly. "Whoever took it?"

Dean looks up. "No idea, Sam." He threads the curved needle through.

"It'd have to be another hunter, right? Maybe somebody saw us with it at the Roadhouse."

Dean's attention is wholly on the stitches. "That'd be my guess."

Silence for a few. "Do you think someone would pay for something like that?"

"I don't _know,_ Sam."

Dean has his own theory; Sam can see it in his eyes. Why Dean won't tell him, he doesn't know, and he's too drained to guess. His mouth is parched, his bones feel like gelatin, everything hurts, and he's dimly aware of the fact that he's breathing more shallowly and rapidly than healthy people generally do. But these things will pass: he's been here before. They both have.

Dean's fingers press gently but firmly into his neck, shockingly warm. Sam hears him breathe out in relief. "Okay, Sleeping Beauty, gimme a hand splinting this so we can both call it a night. It's frigging cold and I want my damned sleeping bag."

Sam sits up very slowly, following the pressure of Dean's hands as he has all his life. He leans forward with his head between his knees while Dean sits Indian-style on the floor and, between the two of them, they get the livid blue of Dean's left wrist bound and splinted under white. Dean strips off his shirt with a grimace, craning his neck for a look at the knife graze on his forearm. It's shallow enough to clean out and bandage as-is, but it's not what Sam's worried about. There's an ugly goose egg on Dean's forehead, mottled purple and still oozing blood. Dean jumps about half a mile when Sam reaches out and swipes it with an alcohol-soaked bit of gauze.

Laughing hurts his ribs, but Sam can't help himself. It's survivor's euphoria as much as anything else. Dean scowls at him and snatches the gauze back. "Dude, not funny."

"You only say that because you couldn't see the look on your face." Sam sobers. "You have a concussion."

"Brilliant deduction, Dr. House."

"So you don't think we should do something about that?"

Dean just looks tired and irritable. "Unless you've got a hospital crammed up your ass somewhere, there's nothing _to_ do, Sammy. I'll be fine. Had plenty of concussions before."

Sam knows it well; he just doesn't like being reminded of it. He has a momentary vision of his brother years from now, eyes dimmed and palsied like Muhammad Ali, and it's all he can do to hold back the bile that creeps up his throat.

It's still better than thinking about the fact that he killed a civilian today. No—not a civilian. "Civilian" is what his father would have said. He killed a person.

Dean spreads their sleeping bags out on the big plywood table; it's far too cold to risk sleeping on the floor and neither of them fits on the couch. Sam fidgets. Then he tries to quell his fidgeting.

He sags forward, eyes on the floor. "What are we going to do when we find out who took Dad's journal?" he bursts out finally.

The rustle of sleeping bags stops. After a moment's silence, Dean crosses to the couch, crouches down, wraps long fingers around Sam's jaw, and makes him look up. The cold anger on his face is almost a physical shock.

"When I find the son of a bitch who tried to feed us to those animals, I'm going to make sure that screwing with us was the last event of his life. That's just how it's going to be."

He's still holding Sam's gaze, and Sam feels pinned and spread open. The intensity of Dean's looking frightens him sometimes. Dean has always been the guy who showers all his attention on his dorky little brother, and Sam has always been at a loss as to why. It makes him feel awkward and small. Sam's an all right guy, he knows that. It's just that never in his life has he done anything to merit the kind of interest Dean fixes on him. While Sam loves his brother and would do things for him that he doesn't like to think about, when it comes to Dean, familial devotion is a whole other ball game. Some ball game Sam sucks at. It's like there's a part of Dean whose inner workings are cloaked to Sam, maybe forever, and for all the times he's tried to pull away and make them both some space of their own, that possibility scares him.

Since it seems to be the only thing to do, Sam just nods.

Dean helps him back into clothing and onto the pallet he's made up on the table, coaxing him to curl up on his right side in the recovery position. It's got to be early still, but there's no sense of time in the trailer with the windows blocked and Sam's exhausted. Dean, too. It's all there in the slope of his back.

Warmth is at a premium, so there's really no question about sharing blankets. The weight of a thousand childhood memories of sleeping next to Dean press down on Sam in the dimness as Dean slips his .45 under the cushion he stole from the couch and joins him.

They lie side by side for a long while, each silently nursing his own wounds. Sam feels like he's sinking down into the table, draining away through the floor and into the soil. He can tell Dean's still awake by his breathing.

"We shouldn't hustle people who don't have anything left," Sam says to the ceiling.

It's a few moments before Dean shifts and turns over to face Sam. "Don't you even goddamn start that."

He looks angry, and Sam isn't naïve enough to think that some of that anger isn't for him even if the deeper fury has a different object. They can both piss each other off like no one else on Earth. "Do _what?"_ Sam says through his teeth.

"Start with the blaming yourself or the guilt or the rationalizing it or whatever pop psych trauma crap this is. It wasn't your fault. You were defending yourself."

Sam clenches his jaw and looks anywhere but at Dean. Some ex-cons tried to gang rape him, he killed someone, and he can't work out whose is the greater sin and the moral calculus is making him dizzy. He needs to know, too. He needs to be able to tote up his failings against those inherent in the circumstances and know where he stands. He doesn't know why. He just does.

Anyway, Dean's wrong. It isn't that he feels guilty, or even bad, really. Eric was the kind of human being whose takeaway lesson from prison had been that rape is how to punish someone and bring them to heel, and Sam can't bring himself to be sorry that he's no longer in the world. It's more a sense somewhere in him that a line has been crossed and that however subtle the differences on the other side, there's no reversing them.

Dean's eyes search his face for a few moments longer. There's a whisper against the sleeping bag fabric as Dean starts to reach out under the covers, but draws back. "Go to sleep, Sammy." He turns back over, away from Sam.

Sam lets his eyes slip shut and tries to let his mind slip into white noise. Dean's back is a warm barrier before him. Even when they're sleeping on a damned table, Dean still puts himself between Sam and the door. Most of the time, that annoys Sam—rather, it annoys him on the rare occasions when he thinks about it. Tonight, he's grateful.


	2. Two

Sam starts awake in the dark.

Dean's awake, too. The sound that woke them grates through the cold trailer again: Dean's cellphone.

Dean sits up and looks at Sam in the tiny sliver of moonlight. The ringtone loops again, and the plywood table creaks as Dean reaches down to answer it.

"Hello?"

_"Dean."_

The tinny voice that comes through isn't Bobby's, or Ellen's, or anyone else Sam recognizes. He tenses.

"How'd you get this number?" Dean asks.

_"I called your dad. His voicemail still directs folks to you."_

Sam hears Dean literally swallowing his anger. "Who are you?"

_"Doesn't matter. Did you like the welcome wagon?"_

Spasmodically Dean reaches out for Sam with his left, and the splint knocks against Sam's shoulder.

"Yeah, that," Dean says after a moment, voice tight. "That was hilarious."

_"Wasn't meant to be. Kept you tied up while I got into your car, though, so it served its purpose."_

"We want it back."

_"Why don't you come see me and we'll talk about it?"_

"There's nothing to talk about, buddy."

_"Plenty to talk about, son. There's a cabin off of County Road 13. Turn west on a private road marked Ortiz; it's on the other side of the arroyo. I'll expect you by tonight. Come alone, no copilot."_

The screen lights up as the call disconnects. It illuminates the side of Dean's face for a few seconds, his lips clamped in a line and features controlled. Then that goes dark, too.

A zipper makes an angry wasp sound and Dean slips out and off the table. A moment later the overhead sodium light is on again. It stabs down Sam's optic nerve and straight to the slow pounding in his skull. Fluid loss is a bitch, but he expects Dean's headache dwarfs his own. Sam uncurls himself. His clothing's stiff with blood and his limbs with everything else he can think of. He rolls off the table and nearly blacks out from the head rush.

When his vision clears again, Dean's sitting on the couch, jaw sticking out in his best stoic-face. The look clashes with the bruising on his forehead and the swelling on his nose like a Toys-R-Us in the middle of a war zone, and is so transparent that it's not even worth it to call BS.

Sam feels chilled to his core, imagines a thermometer stuck into his chest coming out reading something medically impossible. He sits on the file cabinet opposite Dean and wraps his arms around himself. Even the rush of bile in his throat is cold. He's sick of being torn in a dozen different directions and nobody giving him any answers.

Because the fact is, nobody used to come after them except the cops and child protective services before Sam came on the scene. Had he not been in shock after the bar fight, he would have realized it sooner. If someone is going to the trouble of hunting them, setting them up, and then setting them up twice for good measure, human or demon, it's a good bet that it's because they want a word with Sam. All he'll be left with if he makes it out alive is the same ignorance he has now and nobody to tell him what it is he's supposed to have done, or what it is he's supposed to do.

"Trap," Sam says, since someone needs to start with the obvious.

"Yeah."

Sam takes a deep breath, which is painful, and not in the emotional sense. "I think… I think this might be one of Gordon's friends."

Dean wipes his hands down his face and drops them in his lap. "Could be, yeah."

Sam stops. "Wait a second. You knew this?"

Dean glares up at him. "No, Sam, I didn't _know_ and we still don't, but who else would it be? Yeah, of course I thought it."

"Well, Jeez, Dean, were you planning to share this theory with me?"

"Oh, do not even start in on that crap with me."

Sam throws his hands up.

"What the hell do you want me to say, Sam? I've been living with this ever since Gordon went full metal jacket on us, wondering who he told and how many buddies he has gunning for you, looking over my shoulder just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Though not enough, apparently," he mutters.

Sam's anger is real (_why will no one tell him anything?_) but dampened by just how much he feels like stomped over crap. Little of it was ever really for Dean, anyway. Neither of them has the energy to fight, not really.

Sam exhales. "He knows we'll go in there after the journal." He shakes his head. "We need a strategy. Something to regain the advantage."

To regain it would require that they'd ever had it in the first place, but Dean doesn't comment on that beyond giving Sam an incredulous look. "Short of napalming the place, it's not looking great from here, Sammy. Though I've always kinda wanted to try that," he adds reflectively.

Sam rests his chin on his steepled fingers and closes his eyes for a moment to bring up his mental picture of their New Mexico maps. The private road isn't familiar, but it wouldn't be on the road maps and he did look at a topo map; he draws a mental picture of the terrain northeast of the construction site, extrapolating from the elevations and watersheds. The area the caller indicated is a wash backing into the mountains, scored deep with arroyos and gorges; erosion probably means little in the way of cover, maybe some sage scrub and a few piñons….

"There's something," he mumbles. "There's always something."

Heavy warmth settles over his shoulders; Sam looks up at Dean, who's just put one of the sleeping bags over him. "Thanks," he says awkwardly. Then he stops. Styrofoam coolers are stacked up to serve as an end table next to the couch. Sam looks from them to Dean.

"Napalm's not the worst idea ever," he says slowly.

Dean follows his gaze. He stares at Sam. "You're screwing with me."

Sam looks back defiantly.

Brow furrowed, Dean stands there in silence, and Sam knows he's remembering their father's stories about his tour in Vietnam. In short, minimally descriptive sentences, John told them once about seeing napalm dropped on Viet Cong foxholes. One Thanksgiving, the only day of the year Sam could ever recall his father getting drunk, he brought it up again for the last time. _It was a lot like hellfire,_ he said, almost musingly, bottle cradled between his fingers. Sam didn't eat the Boston Market turkey that night.

Sam takes a deep breath. "He's expecting us to come through the arroyo, right? We'll have to cross it to get to the cabin he's talking about. We can line it with napalm. Then we Molotov the cabin, ignite the arroyo, and circle to higher ground. Block his escape routes and make him come to us."

The truth is, Sam wants revenge. The truth is, his skin is flushed with an anger like a fever, qualitatively different from all the many kinds of anger he's felt before, and that's surprising in itself. The truth is that he sees the owner of the voice on the phone covered in jellied gasoline, sees it pouring through a generic cabin window (lots of it, far more than the styrofoam coolers would yield) and the man twisting and screaming in agony and _wants that._ Part of him wants it. He wants it with a suddenness and force that leaves him shaking. Wants to burn Eric over and over again, too, maybe.

Every now and again, these kinds of fantasies crowd in on him with so much intensity that they take his breath away. Dean's always nagging him to get the stick out of his ass, but Dean doesn't understand that Sam doesn't dare let himself be uninhibited like him. These feelings scare him, and judging by the palpable relief on Dean's face when Sam only suggests napalming the inert ground, he'll never breathe a word about them to his big brother. Better that Dean go on thinking he's still gentle little Sammy, or that he ever really was.

Dean's still frowning. "We might torch Dad's journal in the process."

"Safer than leaving it out there for someone to use it against us," Sam says.

"Okay," Dean says finally. "It's a start. But you're not coming."

"Yes, I am!"

Dean's got his big-brother's-in-charge face on. "Sam, he's probably sitting there waiting for you to show up. That's why he said to come alone, just to make sure I don't."

"I know that," Sam snaps. "And it doesn't matter. You aren't doing this alone; it's suicide."

"Forget it, Sam."

Sam slams his hand against the wall. The whole trailer rocks slightly, and his brother raises his eyebrows. "You don't think maybe I've got a personal stake in this, Dean?"

Dean looks back, sizing him up.

"Look," Sam says more calmly. "Neither of us can do this by ourselves, not after the beating we took. So are we getting the journal back or not?"

Suddenly Dean stands, masking the difficulty of the movement with military rigidity and a shut-down expression. "All right. Let's do this."

º º º º

"We may actually be the most pathetic assault force ever," Sam says.

"Thanks for the pep talk, Sam. You ever think about joining the cheer squad?"

Sam snorts. They are, though. He's moving like he's eighty, Dean's still concussed, and they've got two functioning hands between them. The ground still tilts when Sam stands up too fast, and he can feel a fever building, probably from the wound on his leg. Winchesters don't stop till the job's done, though, and after a moment of staring out the windshield, they both open their doors in tandem and get out.

The Impala's parked in a notch in the crumbling hills to either side of the poorly maintained road, more to hide from any police who might still be out looking for them than from their opponent. Down where the road ends, they can just make out the arroyo the hunter talked about in the near-dark. The ground on the other side is high, rough, cut into by secondary erosion channels all leading down into the broader bed of the arroyo. Lots of routes to the top; lots of places to get ambushed.

Dean hands Sam a .45 and checks the clip on his own. They each take a metal container.

Sam's hands smell of gasoline. They mixed gas from tractors and the Impala's reserve store in an empty paint bucket with all the styrofoam they could find, kneading it by hand to produce a crude napalm. It needed to be thick enough to make a stable, slow-burn firewall and thin enough to pour. Sam prays it'll be enough.

"Ready?" he asks.

Dean grins. "Oh, yeah."

"Pyro," Sam mutters, but he can't help a little thrill of his own. It's going to be one hell of a light show.

They move tactically to where the road gives out into the arroyo, one on either side of the road and using what cover they can get. More snow doesn't look likely, but the sky is overcast, clouds alternately hiding and revealing the sliver of moon. Sam could do with a little less wind for this.

A glint of glass in the dark marks where the cabin sits on the top of a ridge over the arroyo. The path of the dry riverbed itself bends just there, bowing around the ridge, and Sam's heart lifts. Luck is with them. The curve of the arroyo affords their opponent a better vantage from the cabin for sniping, but it'll also allow them to partially encircle his position with the napalm. It might even make Sam's plan to flush him out to where they're waiting for him less than completely insane.

They both leave their napalm under cover at the brink of the arroyo and go back to the car for more. It's difficult one-handed, and as they return and start the process of running from one scrap of cover to the next to reach the opposite wall of the riverbed, Sam feels more exposed than he has since—well. Since being under Eric's hands yesterday.

The hunter is up there with a scope and night vision, Sam knows. He's probably seen them by now, though he clearly hasn't gotten a good enough look to take the shot. This won't work if he sees what they're doing, and Sam hunches over, ribs screaming, to obscure the can with his body. In intermittent shadow flashes, he sees Dean doing the same.

Sam takes a deep breath, runs, and leaps into the thick sage scrub right against the wall of the arroyo. The gas can hits his wounded leg and sends a spike of agony up his thigh and stabbing through his gut. The leg buckles under him. He lies in the sagebrush, counting his breaths, waiting for the pain to recede, waiting for a bullet. It doesn't come. Finally he pulls himself up into a shaky crouch and starts inching along the bottom of the ridge, glopping the napalm onto the bushes and stiff, winter-dead weeds.

Several minutes later, Dean lands next to him under a desert olive. He chucks away his empty napalm container and leans back against the narrow trunk. "I sat on a fucking cactus," he mutters.

"Try explaining that to your next date."

"Bite me. You finish with yours?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah. Hey, Sammy?"

"What?"

"Change of plans. I'm going up to talk to him. I'll flush him out and meet you on the next ridge."

"What—? No! Dean, you can't just walk in there!"

"Gordon didn't kill me; he only wanted you."

"And we're so sure this guy is just like Gordon why, exactly?"

"Look, somebody's got to Molotov the cabin, right? We only get one shot at this, and we can't count on getting close. The outside is probably booby trapped. He won't be expecting us to burn the place if I'm in there with him."

"Yeah, because it's idiotic!"

"Someone has to drive him up the hill, Sam. Come on. We both know there's too many holes in this plan, too many places for him to slip through and circle back on us if we don't have eyes on him. Light the napalm when you see the cabin go up. You wanted to do this, fine, but this is how it's going to be." He stands and claps Sam on the shoulder. "Steep climb, better get started." He sprints off into the dark.

"Dean, don't— _Dean!"_

Dean just waves and keeps going.

Swearing under his breath, Sam takes off in the opposite direction.

It is a steep climb—a sheer drop, in places. The soil crumbles under foot and the snow slicks the larger rocks. More than once, Sam loses his footing and ends up flat on his front, black spots crowding his vision as the ground impacts his cracked ribs. He keeps going. Dean's moving faster than he is, and Sam has to be in position when the cabin goes up or all of this will be pointless.

He circles wide around the cabin, trusting to the piñons and the darkness to shroud him. This close to the Jemez Mountains, the hills mount up fast and are cut deep by spring streams. There's a ridge behind the one the cabin—Christ, it's small, just a shack, and really he hopes Dean gets out of there _fast_—is situated on, higher, and divided from the lower ridge by a fold full of snow and sage. Sam clambers up onto a rock outcropping on it and strains to see in the dark.

He isn't sure he can hit the napalm from here. He's got the three bottles of thickened alcohol slung around his waist to get this right, and if he doesn't, their whole plan short-circuits.

Silence. Dark. Waiting. Pain and bone-deep cold.

Suddenly there's a spark. It's maybe forty, fifty feet in front of him, a small glint of red. Then there's shouting and the spark becomes a solid square of orange.

He throws the first Molotov. It lands in a crevice near the bottom of the hill, just a splotch of fire sputtering in the snow. His pulse is pounding. He lights the second one and throws again, harder. It hits something on the way down, bounces, and lands in the scrub below. A second later, there's a punched-pillow sound and the arroyo leaps up into flame.

Sam doesn't waste time. He's up and moving, chucking the last Molotov to roll down the hill and light the other side of the fire trap and pulling his gun. Two figures framed by red light are running towards him.

"Dean!"

They're close enough for Sam to make out faces when Dean goes down. Tripwire, Sam realizes, and for a heart-stopping moment he expects an explosion. None comes, but the shorter figure Dean was driving before him turns and brings the butt of his rifle down.

"No!"

Sam skids to a halt when the man hauls Dean to his knees and points the rifle at his head. "Stop right there!" he shouts.

Sam pants. Adrenaline has swept all pain away and the .45 doesn't waver in his hand. The man's face is red, streaked with sweat and soot; the stench of burning styrofoam roars at them from below.

"Who the hell are you?" Sam shouts.

"You can call me Luke. I'm a friend of Gordon Walker's. I was a friend of your father's."

Sam can see the fury on Dean's face from here. "You call this friendship?"

"Yes, I do, son."

Sam's stomach churns. He edges forward a few steps. "All we want is the journal."

"And all I want is you," says the man, evenly.

He's older than John was, but not as old as he looks. He moves too fast for that. White hair trims his face, and he has piercing blue eyes fixed on Sam. With a chill, Sam recognizes him: he was in the diner where he and Dean had breakfast yesterday. Nothing stood out about him; not once did they realize the threat. _Always be aware of your surroundings_ was John's first commandment, and apparently Sam hasn't assimilated it nearly as well as he thought.

"Why?" Sam asks. "What the hell do you want with me?"

"I think you know, Sam."

"No, I really don't!"

"You're not right, Sam. Might not be your fault, but it's so. John died before he got a chance to do anything about it, so I'm going to see to it for him. For him, and for everybody, because it's the right thing to do."

"You hurt my brother, I will _end_ you," Dean growls.

Sam's mind is racing, but he doesn't know how to end this stalemate. Twenty feet separate him from his brother and he doesn't dare get closer. He switches tracks. "Give us back our Dad's journal."

Without taking his finger off the trigger, Luke reaches into his jacket and pulls out John Winchester's diary. He drops it in front of Dean.

"You set us up at that bar," Sam calls. "Not very sportsmanlike."

Luke shrugs. "Couldn't afford to be sportsmanlike. I maybe dropped hints that a couple of shysters would be passing through later, and that the way to the older one was through the younger. Sorry, boys. But that's just good hunting."

Loathing is plain on Dean's face. "You have no idea who you set on us, do you?"

Luke glances at him, a trace of confusion in his expression, but then he returns to Sam. "Come on, Sam. No one else has to get hurt. You know that's what your father would have wanted."

Sam hesitates. Dean sees it. "Sammy, no!"

"If I give you a free shot, you let him go?" Sam calls over the roar of the fire.

"Don't you dare, don't you _fucking_ dare, Sam—"

"Yep," Luke calls back. "What's it gonna be, son?"

Sam licks his lips. He glances from Dean to the burning cabin. "I think—"

Dean moves. He gets up under the rifle and seizes it. A round hits the snow inches away before Dean smashes the butt into Luke's face.

Sam runs down the hill and leaps over the crevice between them to pull up beside Dean, breathing hard. "You okay?" he asks.

Dean keeps the rifle trained on Luke, who stands a few feet away with his hands up. "I'm great," says Dean. He drags the journal toward him with the heel of his boot, says, "Cover him, will you," and stoops to retrieve it.

His left wrist is twice its normal size. He has to put the rifle down to pick the journal up. As Dean lays the rifle in the snow and reaches for the book, Luke looks back at Sam. "Are you going to shoot another hunter, Sam?" he asks. And he bolts.

Sam swears and takes off after him. Luke is running downhill, _toward_ the fire, and Sam can't understand why—

Suddenly the ground gives way beneath him. Pain bites into his ankle and he goes down hard. Booby trap. He can hear Dean shouting his name.

Luke appears above him. "I'm willing to die to do what's right, even if you aren't."

Sam's vision is swimming. He can't figure out what the words mean. Then Luke's hands are on him, under his armpits, wrapping around him tight, and they're rolling down the hill.

Snow burns cold on his skin. Rocks and roots pummel his body, padded only by the snow; Sam instinctively tries to tuck his head in, bringing himself in closer to the other man's body. He scrabbles for purchase, but the ground rushes by too fast. They're headed for the inferno.

_Maybe you belong there._

Dean's voice is thin and frantic and far away. Dean. He can't leave Dean.

Sam claws the ground and feels his fingernails tear away, and then he catches something. His body stops with a huge, heavy jolt. Momentum carries him in an arc until his feet are pointed downward over nothing but heat. Tree root. He's holding a tree root. Luke's holding him.

Sam pushes at the hunter's shoulder with his broken hand, but he's too weak. Blindly he slams his head forward. There's a sound of crunching bone, a warm gush, and then the arms around him are gone. Luke falls.

"Sammy!"

Sam cranes his neck to look up the hill as he hears Luke's body tumbling down to the arroyo behind him. Dean's coming, jumping and skidding down to the drop-off where Sam's hanging on.

"Hang on, hang on—I got you, I got you—"

Dean's pulling him up the hill. He can barely feel his legs working and the pain of it. It's hard to breathe down here, hot and toxic. There's screaming.

They collapse on a patch of snow near the top of the ridge. The heat of the burning cabin reaches their face even as cold wetness soaks through their pants. Down in the arroyo, Luke is still screaming. Sam is sickened. He turns and buries his face in his brother's shoulder. Dean's arms come up around him, and he can feel that Dean is shaking, too.

º º º º

They get to Bobby's two days later. Sam gets immediately put to bed on the couch with about a week's supply of antibiotics and maybe half a bottle of Vicodin. Bobby says something about re-doing his stitches, but Sam passes out before they even get around to stripping him.

He wakes up in sweatpants and the dark. There's tape on his ribs, an Ace bandage on the ankle he sprained in the trap, and he feels less feverish. Bobby or Dean left him a glass of Gatorade.

Low voices and a dim glow come from the kitchen. Sam pushes back the blankets—oh, cute, Dean dressed him in somebody's old Barney tee-shirt—and swings his legs over the side of the couch. He downs the Gatorade and limps to the kitchen.

The clock over the stove reads 2:45. Bobby and Dean have a bottle of Jack between them, half empty. They look up as Sam comes in, and Bobby says, "Good to see you up. How're you feeling?"

"Better."

Dean's got circles under his eyes, and the bruising on his face has turned the mottled combination of green, purple, and yellow of a contusion's ugliest stage. "Go back to bed, Sam," he says wearily.

Sam ignores him, letting himself down into a chair. He wets his lips with his tongue. "Find out anything?"

The cracked ribs have led to a minor respiratory infection; his voice is wrecked and his throat is raw. Bobby raises an eyebrow at him, but all he says is, "Luke Farmer was a hunter, all right, came through the Roadhouse from time to time. Ellen said she'd seen him drinking with Gordon once or twice. Didn't know a lot else about him."

"Like how many other people the bastard might have sicced on us," says Dean. He takes a swig from his glass.

"Did Dad really know him?"

Bobby shrugs. "If he did, I never heard of him till now. He might've been shining you."

"Or he might not."

"Sam, it doesn't matter," Dean says. "If you're friends with someone, you don't go trying to kill their son. He wasn't Dad's friend." He knocks back the rest of his drink.

Sam reaches for the bottle; Dean promptly takes it away from him. "What the hell, Sam?"

He exhales, biting back irritation. "Give me a damned drink, Dean."

They look at each other for a while before Dean finally picks up the bottle, pours a finger in his own glass, and slides it across to Sam. He gets up to grab a coffee mug from the rack beside the sink, tips more of the Jack Daniels into it, tops Bobby off, and sits back down. "Cheers," he says wryly, and takes a swallow.

Sam sips the whiskey. It's warm going down, finally loosening something that's been clenched and cold since New Mexico. His gaze falls on their father's journal where it lies next to the bottle. This feels oddly like John Winchester's wake.

Under the table, he feels Dean's hand warm on his knee, just for a second. It's comfort and some sort of promise.

Bobby raises his glass. "To absent friends," he says. Dean clinks him with his coffee mug, and Sam follows suit.

They drink in the warm light of the kitchen.


End file.
